Subject: [Disman] Check MIB module

From: Juergen Quittek <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2004 10:11:34 +0100

Dear all,

Happy new year!

At NEC we tried to use a combination of the Event MIB and the
Expression MIB for remote health check operations on a large set
of small managed devices.  We found the overhead of development
cost, footprint and complexity of usage rather high for this
application.

Many nice features were hardly used, while a few were sufficient
to fulfill most of our requirements.  For most of our health checks
we were fine with
  - a compare operation between an arbitrary managed object and
    a constant value
  - a logical AND operation over the results of all comparisons

In the end we wrote a new MIB module, the Check MIB
<http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-nunzi-check-mib-00.txt>,
with a hard coded AND operation and configurable compare operations.
We added a few more features, such as a severity for each comparison,
a notification mechanism, a list of failed comparisons and some means
for dealing with situations were resources at small managed nodes are
very limited.  In the end the Check MIB turned out to be smaller and
simpler than the individual Event MIB or the individual Expression
MIB.  Certainly, this is due to the fact that we concentrate on
remote health check operations.

We want to further develop and improve the Check MIB.
Everybody who wants to join us is very welcome!
I'm looking forward to your comments.

Thanks,

    Juergen
-- 
Juergen Quittek        [email-masked]       Tel: +49 6221 90511-15
NEC Europe Ltd.,       Network Laboratories        Fax: +49 6221 90511-55
Kurfuersten-Anlage 36, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany   http://www.ccrle.nec.de